12 “WordPress Words” You Need to Know About

Do you know how to hook an filter into the Loop? Scratch that–let’s just disable shortcode usage in custom fields for Contributors. Wait… do you even know what I’m talking about?

If you don’t, have no fear! I didn’t know about any of these words either, when I started my first WordPress website. So, in this article, I’m going to list some of the most popular WordPress words that needs a bit of explaining for new users.

PS: Yeah, yeah, I know–some of these words are actually two words. Sue me!

WordPress Words You Need to Know Yesterday

The Loop: Probably the most important term you’ll ever know. It means the post or the list of posts rendered within the page it’s in. It can be a single post, an archive of posts or a specially configured list of posts.

Shortcode: The special code snippet which turns into elements or alters the content in some way. It’s written like this: [shortcode]Content[/shortcode] or just [shortcode]. Shortcode can accepts “arguments” like [shortcode argument="value"].

Contributor: One of the five default user roles. Contributors can write new posts and edit their own posts, but can’t publish them–an editor has the right to publish their content after they send the post for review.

Custom Field: One of the “boxes” under the visual editor (where you write and edit your posts in the admin panel) that represent “Post Meta”, which can be considered as the “meta content” of your posts. Consists of two fields: name and value.

Hook, Action and Filter: Three separate words! Hooks are the main reason that WordPress is so flexible and extensible. They’re “functions” that either alter the content (which are called “filter hooks”) or triggered by certain events (which are called “action hooks”).

Multisite: An underrated feature of WordPress that lets you create multiple websites under a single WordPress installation. The websites could be in different subdirectories (example.com/one and example.com/two), different subdomains (one.example.com and two.example.com), or even different domains (exampleone.com and exampletwo.com). Fun fact: WordPress.com is the most epic example of a Multisite installation!

Slug: The part of a post’s URL which identifies the post with generated or customized words. If http://example.com/2016/08/12/hello-world/ is the URL, hello-world is the slug.

Toolbar: The top bar which is shown everywhere for logged in users. Its old name was “Admin Bar”, and it can be customized however you like.

Taxonomy: The type of “classification” of posts. Two default taxonomies are “categories” and “tags”, but you can create an infinite amount of taxonomies. (Bonus word: The terms that you use under a taxonomy are called, well, “terms”.)

Conclusion (not a word!)

I think this might be the best list ever that contains 12 of the most popular WordPress words. Or terms. Or this is a mini “WordPress glossary”. (Speaking of: Would you like us to prepare a free ebook of a more detailed WordPress glossary? Let us know.)

Do you have any other words that should have been on this list? Shoot them in the Comments section below. And, as always, if you liked the article, don’t forget to share it with your friends!